First, congratulations to Avast for being awarded 2018 Product of the Year by AV-comparatives. That's great, being honored like that by the first certified EICAR Trusted IT-Security Lab, but...

Second, why is it that Sophos is never one of the vendors in any of these tests? When AV was my responsibility, I ran my own tests using honeypots, and Sophos was almost always the number one preventive AV. Whenever I see these articles, Sophos is never one of the vendors tested. What gives?

I feel that some of these comparison reports are not accurate or very bias.

Sometimes they leave out certain brands or certain products or compare different product range.

......

I remember approx 3 years ago (sometime in 2016) being involved in some comparison reports on backup solutions which if I am not wrong Veeam "VBR" was not included as the moderators could not figure out if to include VBR, VAW (known as Veeam free back then) or Veeamzip (there was some late communication with Veeam as well).

The reports included how fast to backup (physical servers and/or VMs), how fast to backup files, compression ratio, how fast to compress, various features like retention periods, rotation scheme "like grandfather-father-son", backup to disk vs backup to tape.....etc

Then we about 100 people (IT Exec, managers & IT decision makers etc), "as corporate users" were invited to view their reports, products tested and labs etc....

We did have a Q&A session in the labs room.....I did ask a question "can show the recovery performance"....the room went quiet as the panel discussed for a bit and their response was "this was to compare backup solutions and its performance, we did not take recovery into consideration":....and of course I was never invited again...at least after 2015.

....

I think we have went past the point where companies openly compared their products vs their previous version vs their closest rivals with charts.

So I would take these comparison reports as just a FYI and also look out for products that they missed....like AV....Symantec have at least 4 different products for client protection ranging from AV to Endpoint protection and many have options like cloud or non-cloud options as well that can be considered as different products.

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I feel that some of these comparison reports are not accurate or very bias.

Sometimes they leave out certain brands or certain products or compare different product range.

......

I remember approx 3 years ago (sometime in 2016) being involved in some comparison reports on backup solutions which if I am not wrong Veeam "VBR" was not included as the moderators could not figure out if to include VBR, VAW (known as Veeam free back then) or Veeamzip (there was some late communication with Veeam as well).

The reports included how fast to backup (physical servers and/or VMs), how fast to backup files, compression ratio, how fast to compress, various features like retention periods, rotation scheme "like grandfather-father-son", backup to disk vs backup to tape.....etc

Then we about 100 people (IT Exec, managers & IT decision makers etc), "as corporate users" were invited to view their reports, products tested and labs etc....

We did have a Q&A session in the labs room.....I did ask a question "can show the recovery performance"....the room went quiet as the panel discussed for a bit and their response was "this was to compare backup solutions and its performance, we did not take recovery into consideration":....and of course I was never invited again...at least after 2015.

....

I think we have went past the point where companies openly compared their products vs their previous version vs their closest rivals with charts.

So I would take these comparison reports as just a FYI and also look out for products that they missed....like AV....Symantec have at least 4 different products for client protection ranging from AV to Endpoint protection and many have options like cloud or non-cloud options as well that can be considered as different products.